Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
With the advance of networking and data storage technologies, an increasingly large number of computing services are being provided to users or customers by cloud-based datacenters that can enable access to computing resources at various levels. Cloud-based service providers may provide individuals and organizations with a range of solutions for systems deployment and operation. The success of cloud-based services means that more and more applications and databases are being moved to the cloud. Customers (or tenants) typically prefer to have the option of moving applications and databases from one service provider to another while maintaining service parameters like performance, cost, liability, and similar ones at similar levels. Service providers may prefer to have the option of moving an application or database from one site to another while maintaining performance and service level of the application.
Storing the databases used in applications that consume large amounts of data can be resource-expensive. Furthermore, moving a large database from an origin datacenter to a destination datacenter may also be expensive. Some practical implementations may take 30-60 days to fully transition a large database to a new datacenter if certainty of good performance is desired. During the transition, a copy of the database needs to be maintained at the datacenter of origin and destination, doubling storage costs.
Even without considering transport and computation costs, moving a database to a new datacenter and accomplishing acceptable performance may thus be costly for average customer databases and even prohibitively costly for larger databases resulting in customers avoiding transfers to new datacenters and limiting competition.